New Printing Technologies to save money

I recently have run across a really neat form of printing. It is used in 5 and 6 color printing and can make any project a whole lot more fun for not too much more money. It's metallic printing that is just a silver layer over cmyk. There is program that you can use in photoshop and illustrator. I will hopefully be getting the ap tomorrow and will be filling you all in on the ups and downs.

Skin tones and how to make them beautiful and consistent when printing

If you are person who likes a matte finish but find that matte paper tends to distort skin tones here is your solution. Print on a gloss paper but then put a matte varnish on it. This way the skin tones will look natural but you will get the matte look you are going for.

Printers Beware

Now that I am on the other side of the printing industry and I have to call and get quotes I want them asap. My customers had an estimate within an hour usually within 15 minutes. I use different printer for different things. I am not going to stump a printer to the point that it takes 2 days to get back to me. If it takes that long to quote a job then you aren't the printer for me. 1. because if it is a job out of your realm then I don't want to work with you and 2. it's all about turn around. I have done your job but you probably don't know that and that's ok. But that isn't how you gain and keep business. My motto in life and in work life is get it done!

On a personal note GETTING SKUNKED

My husband and I have taken the week off me in between jobs and him to interview. About a week and a half ago I was out on the deck and saw something out of the corner of my eye and realized it isn't one of my cats for the door is shut. I just saw the tail and thought skunk but it was almost all white. Ok no big deal but then I was out on Sunday night and saw two of them frolicking in the yard. So of course I grab the laptop and start doing research. The next morning we were able to locate how they were getting in. So we took a piece of wood and wedged it under the fence. Well, this morning it was evident that they wanted to borrow under our garden and make a home. So we decided on chicken wire. We would staple it to the fence and dig it into the ground a bit. While I am filling up the holes that they had dug my husband was checking to make sure that the staple gun had staples and guess what happened he stapled the palm of his hand. So off the hospital for a tetanus shot. It was seriously the fastest I have ever gotten in and out of an emergency room it was a dream. So luckily we were able to get back and finish the job in the daylight. I really hope this works because getting skunked is no fun. If you have any skunk stories I would love to hear them.

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Job Searching

I recently put myself back on the market looking for a new position. Some of the things that I really liked about the company that I chose and chose me was their interviewing process. I had several interviews and had a chance to talk with all the people that I will be working closely with. This shows that the company cares about their current employees and give everyone the opportunity to pick someone they can work with. The other thing that freaked me out was a test. Then again if you say test I am a bit on edge anyway. However, I thought this was a killer way for the company to find out a bit about me and my skills and see my weaknesses and my strengths. The position I am going to be in wears alot of hats and they were ok with that individual having a strength in one area and a weakness in another. This way they were able to see that upfront. I really liked that they put this test together and I think all companies in the industry should do this more often, because alot of people are all talk. It also made me alittle more confident going in knowing what I have to bring to the table. If anyone has anything to add about this topic or feedback about a similar experience that would be great.

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Content who provides it and how

I have been working with this client yes the same one who quark document decided to peter out on my. It is a 32 page program for a weekend show. They have many advertisers and they come in many different way. That's ok but they have the advertisers send it directly to me and the advertisers pretty much make up their own specs. For example I have a half page landscape ad space hmmm I will sent them a 8.5x11 portrait yeah that will fit and look great!

So my biggest gripe over this is telling me to go to a website and dig through it looking for something a)that I don't have the name for b) do not know what it looks like and c)where the heck it is. If you are submitting content from a website there are 1 of two things you can do to make it a bit easier and cost efficient. 1) you can go download the pdf yourself and send it via email or 2) you can go to the link and copy that link into an email and send it. This will save everyone involve a lot of time.

To recap if you are submitting content organize it, bottom line.

Yet Another Reason Quark *&#@'s

Every year a client of mine comes in with a booklet to do for her event and every year I fight with quark. The file is so screwed up that my designer refuses to work on it so I get to do it. Not a big deal I have a bit more patience then her but I only have so much. I am leaving my current employer on Wednesday so I have had to really bang this project out. I am just about doing all the yearly edits while I am rapping up my everything else and training part of my replacement one of three that have been hired to fill my shoes. So I set my trainee up to do some computer learning so I can finish the rest of this thing and I set out to work. Yeah well I go to save it and it will not save, or collect for output on the hard-drive, desktop or the server where it lives. Then it precedes to delete the already saved version before it finishes saving. Then the sucker crashes. All work out the door, now usually it is no big deal but come on it is 35 page brochure. That being said I am redoing it in indesign so the next person to have to work with this file will not have to face the struggles that I have had to endure. If anyone out there can give me any good info on fixing this project it would be much appreciated.

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Working with Photographers

This subject is dear and near to me because it is happening to me. I was married 10 and half months ago and I still don't have a wedding album. Things I wish I had considered asking the photographer before we chose them.

Do you know photoshop?
Do you work on your photos ie. cropping, color correction etc.?
If so can I see see some of this sophisticated work?

Now granted I worked with someone that I knew and we went through other wedding albums she had done. After the wedding she gave me some proofs and they were phenomenal. She did a fantastic job. My mother worked with her to pick out pictures she wanted for her book and the book that my husband and I would have.

The photographer jumped right into this project without being capable of providing the photos in their highest quality. We received a real basic leather bound book that was fantastic but then you open it up and look at the photos. Some were blurry some where off color for example my dress was a latte/really light brown color and in the pictures it look silver. Also, she stretched some of the photos and shrunken some photos so the people in the picture had really long faces or really small round faces. Not too big of a deal there were about 5 out of the bunch lets fix them. Now for the second book again a gorgeous book but it was a composite of photos a background and then two or three laid over the background. This book was a disaster of 72 dpi photos that were pixelated, color corrected horribly and stretched.

This book had to be done all over. After having looked at it I had to step in and get it done correctly. So I asked her for the composites and thought I can just redo the photos and plug them in. Not the case she hadn't saved the files in a layers format so they all had to be redone. This is where I start getting a bit annoyed. There are about 50 pages and probably 150 photos in this book and they all needed to be re-cropted, resized, color corrected, tattoos removed, and some people removed. I had a few disk she had given me as I had asked for all the photos that she had taken at the wedding to be put on the disks. Well, she had given me ones she had already messed with not the originals. So I called and told her which ones I needed and had her upload them to my website. She was rather half assed about this. Then she was going to be leaving the country for sometime. I asked if she could grab every single photo and send them to me. Her husband send it several days after she left and when I got the disks I received 4 disk all of the same photos and not including all the photos in the book.

It is now 4 weeks later and I am almost done with the album layout but I still don't have all the photos to work with. I wrote an email and asked if she go the the book that she has and send me all the photos that she sees in this book. Sure no problem she will overnight the disks to me in the next day or two. Guess what another week has gone by and still she has not sent these off.

So I am venting here on this blog and realizing the mistakes I have made in the process of hiring a photographer.

A. If you are photographer don't chew off more than you can handle.
B. Try things on your own instead with a client and their money.
C. Take a few photoshop classes or find someone to do the photo changes for you.
D. Save all original photo's in a file and save any changes in a new file.
E. Always save a layered version of a photoshop file.
F. Take responsibility when you have screwed up-admit your mistakes
G. An most importantly follow through with your client because this was probably the most frustrating part of this whole ordeal.

If anyone has any other suggestions to add to this experience it is greatly appreciated. I just don't want anyone else to go through something like this.

Rownbc.org is up and running

Yesterday I launched the all new Rownbc.org website. I cleaned up the look as well as all the links, so check it out and let me know what you think.

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We love customers who...

don't wait 'til the last minute to get something printed. If this tends to happen to you often a phone call in advance is appreciated. Especially if there is special paper involved. Most papers we can get over night but some are harder to track down than others. Depending on the paper sometimes it takes longer for the ink to dry as well.

If you are one of those people who is always needing a rush job not that big of a deal, that is why we stay in business. We thrive on people needing us to produce quickly. However, if you are a person who is always having a rush job but then don't pick it up for a week we start to treat your projects like the boy who cried wolf. We just won't take you seriously anymore.

Logo for the Day

While laying in bed last night I thought I would share a logo a day of mine so here you go.

Programs that Should Die

First and foremost PUBLISHER if you want to be take seriously as a designer fork out the money for CS3 it is worth it. If you still want to use Publisher keep in mind that when you send a file to the printer they have to do a lot of work with these files and you will be charged accordingly. Also, this program is supposed to be for non-designers but has more annoying quarks than you can shake a fist at. CS3 mainly Indesign, for layout, will make your life so much easier, save you a ton of time and allow you to have complete control of your designs.

Another program that send chills down the back of printers is Power Point files. Power Point does not hold formatting very well from mac to mac, mac to pc, or pc to pc. These are a pain in the arse to work with and come with a price tag. So if you have a Power Point presentation that you need to have printed and you want it to be formated the same way that you are going to display it, please save it as a pdf and check it against what you are presenting. Then send it to the printer.

Microsoft word is bad but not as bad as the 2 mentioned above. If you work with a printer frequently they are most likely able to give you software that will convert your file to a pdf and automatically upload it to their website for easy output.

Keeping the Price Down on Print & Still Keeping Creative

One thing that can really make a design is the paper. There are so many cool papers out there to use. So if you are doing a simple one color design but you still want it to look unique and stick out think about paper. You may pay a bit more for the paper but doing one color is way cheaper than 2 or 3 and will stand out in the pack.

Another thing to consider is doing a whole business package at one time. A lot of the cost when printing is the set up of the press so if you can do several names for business cards, letterhead, and envelopes all at one time it will be considerably cheaper. If you think you may only need 250 cards for 3 months just print 500 because it will only cost a few dollars more.

Think SIZE when trying to save money. Research and find out what size paper a press will run and try to maximize that space. When people design wedding invites they come up with all sorts of crazy sized announcements which sometimes means money in the end. Meaning they may need an odd sized envelope that will need extra postage. Think backwards, start at the envelope size and work through the design from that. Also, think about how heavy a paper is and if you have a bunch of items going in an envelope, that can add postage as well. So instead of printing the map on a cardstock paper so it will match pick a nice paper that is a text weight this will save you in weight and in money.

Designing for Print

Having worked in the printing industry for many years I have come across some of the most interesting files that are not set up for print from some rather high end design firms. Here is a quick guide for sending files to print.

1. When designing for print make sure you know whether or not it will be done on a four color press meaning you have to convert everything to cmyk or if you are using spot colors. In the case of spot colors don't choose 5 pms colors that are close to each other instead pick as few as you can and us a screen of that color.

2. All photos have to be in 300 dpi nothing less otherwise it will look crummy and you will try to blame the printer.

3. Make sure all fonts and images are included when you send it to press.

4. If you want a bleed, build the bleed in .125" all the way around is sufficient.

These are all great things to keep in mind and will save your company money because they won't have to pay for the printers pre-press department to fix your file.